Friday, January 30, 2009

(The following article first appeared in the April 14, 1993 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly, Downtown. See below for Part 1 of article).

A 1990 book, The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents From The FBI’s Secret War Against Domestic Dissent by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, described how the FBI and U.S. News & World Report also historically collaborated on projects which were designed to red-bait U.S. Baby-Boom Generation New Left radical groups and anti-war groups, such as the publication, under the “editors of U.S. News & World Report byline, of the book Communism and the New Left: What They’re Up To Now:

“Both the FBI and the `friendly journalists’ to whom it habitually fed information at U.S. News & World Report persisted in confusing both the CP, USA’s campus-based W.E.B. DuBois Clubs and the SWP’s Young Socialist Alliance with new left organizations for some time…Probably the best example of this is Editors of U.S. News and World Report, Communism and the New Left: What They’re Up To Now, Collier/Macmillan Company, London, 1969, in which the anonymous authors (thought to include several FBI `public relations specialists’) worry at great length about the…influence of Bettina Aptheker, head of the Berkeley DuBois Club and daughter of CP, USA historian Herbert Aptheker, on `the antiwar movement’…

A U.S. News & World Report article was also used by FBI agents in the 1980s to justify their visits to U.S. librarians in order to secure information about which people borrowed certain library books. As the book Alien Ink: The FBI’s War On Freedom Of Expression by Natalie Robins recalled:

“Fifteen libraries across the country had been targets of FBI inquiries from 1982 to 1988…These libraries had a total of 22 visits from FBI agents…Librarians said that agents invoked `national security,’ `counter-intelligence,’ aid against `hostile foreign agents,’ or `antiterrorism’ in asking for cooperation. One agent flashed a copy of a 1982 U.S. News and World Report article entitled `Drive to Keep Secrets Out of Russian Hands.’”